The apparent winners of the first round of Egypt's landmark presidential vote reached out to rival candidates on Saturday ahead of a June run-off, as international monitors called the initial voting process "encouraging." Final votes were still being counted, but unofficial results suggested that the top two out of 12 candidates were the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Mursi and Ahmed Shafiq, a former premier under ousted Hosni Mubarak.
On Friday night, the Brotherhood said it was seeking to create a coalition of forces to challenge Shafiq, reaching out to Mursi's former rivals, including Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh, who left the organisation to run for president. "We call on all sincere political and national forces to unite to protect the revolution and to achieve the pledges we took before our great nation," it said.
"The slogan now is: 'The nation is in danger'," Essam al-Erian, the deputy head of the Brotherhood's political arm, told AFP. The Brotherhood called a meeting of various candidates on Saturday afternoon, but the campaigns of Abul Fotouh, former foreign minister Amr Mussa and Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi said the three men would not attend.
Shafiq also called for broad support from former rivals, calling on his competitors by name to join him and promising there would be no return to the old regime. "I reach out to all the partners and I pledge that we would all work together for the good of Egypt," he told a news conference. Addressing the youth that spearheaded the 2011 revolt, he said: "Your revolution has been hijacked and I am committed to bringing (it) back."
"I pledge now, to all Egyptians, we shall start a new era. There is no going back." As the top two candidates worked to rally support for the run-off, leftist candidate Hamdeen Sabbahi, who came third, is to file a lawsuit over alleged voting irregularities that may have affected the result of the first round, a lawyer for his campaign said.
Sabbahi "will file a suit with the election commission over irregularities," Mahmoud Qandeel told AFP. A Shafiq-Mursi run-off looks likely to further polarise a nation that rose up against the authoritarian Mubarak 15 months ago but has since suffered endemic violence and a declining economy. The contest presents a difficult choice for activists who led the revolt against Mubarak. For them, choosing Shafiq would be to admit the revolution had failed, but a vote for Mursi would threaten the very freedoms they fought for.